Music, Citizenship and Vernacular Cosmopolitanism in Luanda, Angola

Abstract

This dissertation explores the relationship between traditional music and urban belonging in present-day Luanda, the capital of Angola. Through an ethnographic and historical examination of the daily lives of folkloric artists, particularly marimba players, it reveals how their different modes of engagement with local musical instruments enable them to negotiate alternative forms of urban belonging that challenge established dichotomies such as the modern-traditional, urban-rural, and elite-mass. These forms, which stand at the margins of the capital's soundscape, question and complicate the official notion of Angolanness (Angolan identity) and help illuminate the ways in which they mirror and interact with the fissures and frictions of post-conflict urban development and the brutally extractive economic regime. After twenty-seven years of armed conflict and a decade of war for independence, the Angolan state carried out a program of national reconstruction drawing from the oil profits generated by a booming economy in the first decade of the 21st century. This program proved to be highly controversial and reinforced spatial and class differences across the metropolitan area. The rapid growth and remodeling of the city based on foreign imaginaries and modernist views not only has changed the architecture of Angola’s capital but also, as I will show, has strongly affected the everyday musical production and consumption of Luanda’s inhabitants. In a context that usually privileges the study of popular culture in the analysis of African urban space, my project aims to bring attention back to rural and migrant musical expressions as equally important dimensions for understanding the phenomenon of modernity on the continent. By carrying out research with individuals on the margins of the metropolitan soundscape, the dissertation proves how the study of music may help illuminate issues of urban inequality and reveal practices of creative resilience against top-down neoliberal logics. In doing so, this work enters into dialogue with the lively academic debate on the urban Global South, joining the scholarly effort to provide bottom-up perspectives of the everyday experiences of city dwellers.